THE STORY – Megan Rapinoe prepares for her last major tournament at the 2023 World Cup while engaging with her political stances.
THE CAST – Megan Rapinoe, Sue Bird, Jess Fishlock, Colin Kaepernick, Alex Morgan & Briana Scurry
THE TEAM – Rebeca Huntt (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
Just in time to cure our post-World Cup hangover, Megan Rapinoe gets the documentary treatment courtesy of “Beba” director Rebeca Huntt. The film, aptly titled “Rapinoe,” just had its World Premiere at TIFF and dutifully chronicles the dramatic, surprising, and at times exhilarating life of its main subject while offering small but important morsels of intimacy that are not typical for safe, biopic-type documentaries of this nature. For those who follow the news even slightly, Megan Rapinoe is a mostly known quantity. She led the Women’s U.S. Soccer team to two consecutive and thrilling World Cup victories – a feat the men’s team has never neared – and an Olympic gold medal. Her status as a queer woman and her pursuits of social justice put her squarely in the crosshairs of today’s talking heads. Her journey was not always linear and in fact was at times rocky, and her upbringing in a conservative rural town made none of this easier. So while she is not precisely an enigmatic figure, the film titled after her does leave audiences with a least a fresh perspective, a feeling that we managed to find something new about a well-known public figure.
The film “Rapinoe” starts and ends as a conventional, chronological documentary, with interviews interspliced with news clips, montages, and well-placed transition titles. We learn first that Rapinoe was born in rural and conservative Redding, California, in 1985. Her family was strictly working class, but her soccer ambitions and talents were visible by the time she was nine years old. Her family, unable to financially support her desires, benefited from a kind local family, that saw in her great talent. Soon thereafter, the troubles started. Rapinoe’s twin brother fell, like so many of his demographic, into a severe drug dependency from which he nearly never recovered. This taxed his family, particularly his sister, greatly, and the modern-day interview clips leave no doubt of the toll that drugs took on the once young man. Megan fought through this as her first test of adversity, but it would assuredly not be her last.
Rapinoe rose steadily but surely among the relatively thin ranks of U.S. women’s soccer. By 2011 she had not only played in several professional leagues, including internationally, but was headed to her first World Cup, which ended in a crushing but also defining defeat for her and her teammates. Throughout, she endured a series of debilitating injuries that crushed her body and her spirit, but she carried on. The drama increased significantly for Megan’s life, and for the film, after her dramatic 2015 Women’s World Cup victory. This was followed almost immediately by the beginning of her life in the limelight of public drama when, in 2016, and following the move by famed NFL player Colin Kaepernick, Megan decided to start kneeling during the U.S. National Anthem in protest against racial injustice. In the clickbait interviews by the media that followed, Rapinoe announced, “As a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all your liberties.” Wowza – what a difference a decade makes, as it seems almost inconceivable that any celebrity big or small would exercise their First Amendment rights in such a fashion today.
But that was 2016, and you-know-who was still early in the political firmament. Still, it is at this point that “Rapinoe” truly lifts off and does not stop in its intensity until the final moments. This being a documentary about a controversial public figure in 2026, one who is a gay woman with unabashedly progressive views, the question is not “if” but “when” you-know-who will be mentioned. Soon enough, he is – how could he not be, since he elevated Rapinoe’s profile exponentially by tweeting directly about her – though director Huntt makes the significant choice of not ever showing his face. And this was, arguably, not the greatest drama in Rapinoe’s storied public history. Nor was it her relationship with WNBA star Sue Bird, which is actually almost entirely devoid of controversy, at least as presented. Without question, the most astounding chapter is the work she did to champion equal pay for women’s sports in the U.S. She cares about the issue that animated Kaepernick, sure, but gender equality is clearly her one true north star, one that motivates her incessantly and that has led to improbable but groundbreaking results.
While it may sound from these descriptions as if “Rapinoe” proceeds almost entirely like a Wikipedia entry – and there is some truth to that – the movie continually rises above the genre with small interspersed personal tidbits directly from Rapinoe herself. A lot of these occur on a couch, as if she is laying down for a therapy session. This is mostly playful, but when at one point Rapinoe announces that she realized she needed therapy for unknown but ever-present emotional baggage, you know she is not joking. It is during this and other similar moments – for example, how she handles the unceremonious end to her career—that you see the real Rapinoe, and realize that there is much more than meets the eye. For someone this successful and this unrepentantly vocal, you would imagine a big ego. Instead, what we see is not exactly humility, but persistent self-doubt and anxiety, surrounded by a relentless desire to win. It is refreshing for the genre, which typically thinly veil “poor suffering hero” stories meant to vindicate some grudge or chip-on-shoulder that the film’s subject has. If Rapinoe was faking this at times startling sincerity about her own emotional shortcomings, she deserves the Academy Award for Best Actress to add to her collection of prizes.
The point of the film, then, is not to idolize her or see her as a modern-day hero. Instead, “Rapinoe” insists only that from adversity can come a drive to win and change the world, that ostracizing can lead to successful defiance, and that challenges are the stuff of true champions. Rapinoe was not always perfect, she did not always win, and she was not always right, but she was always dedicated and committed, despite her insecurities. It sounds pretty heroic when you think of how things have changed since she rose to the cruel spotlight in 2016. Ultimately, “Rapinoe” is a good movie not because it uncovers some shocking secret about its famous subject, but because it lets the familiar details accumulate into a fuller, messier portrait of ambition, anxiety, defiance, and hard-won change. Huntt’s film may follow the trodden contours of the traditional sports biography, yet Rapinoe’s believable candor – and the sheer force of the battles she chose to fight – gives it a welcome pulse. We already knew she could win. What the documentary adds, in its best moments, is a clearer sense of what all that winning cost her, and why she kept pushing anyway.
